Michael Kraus

Michael W. Kraus (born 1981) is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. He currently leads the Contending with Societal Inequality Laboratory. Previously, he was an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. His research examines inequality, race, power, emotion, empathy, and social cognition.

Education

Kraus received his B.A. in psychology and sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. He later earned an M.A. in psychology from Berkeley in 2006 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 2010.

Career

Kraus was a psychology and medicine postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco from 2010 to 2012, and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2012 to 2015.

In 2022, Yale denied Kraus tenure, a decision that drew public attention and debate in higher education. An open letter signed by numerous academics urged Yale to reconsider the decision and raised concerns about colorblindness and the evaluation of scholarship on racism and inequality. Kraus later wrote about the experience in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Kraus was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation during the 2023–2024 academic year. In 2024, he joined Northwestern University as professor of psychology and Morton O. Schapiro Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.

Research

Kraus's research examines how inequality shapes social perception, emotion, interpersonal behavior, and public beliefs about society.

His early work examined social class as a psychological and cultural context. With Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, and colleagues, Kraus argued that lower-class contexts tend to foster contextual awareness and interdependence, whereas upper-class contexts tend to foster agency and self-focus.

Kraus has also studied how social class is communicated through behavioral signals. In a 2009 study, Kraus and Keltner found that observers could infer socioeconomic status from brief video clips of social interaction. In later work, he examined class signals in clothing and speech.

Kraus's work on economic mobility has examined how Americans overestimate the likelihood of upward class mobility. In a 2015 New York Times opinion, Kraus discussed research showing that Americans overestimate the accessibility of the American dream.

Another area of Kraus's research concerns emotion, empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior. In a 2010 study of the National Basketball Association, Kraus and colleagues found that early-season physical touch among teammates predicted later individual and team performance, with cooperation accounting for the association between touch and team performance. The study later received attention in professional sports, including coverage of Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Liam Coen referencing it in discussions of team culture.

In work with Jennifer Richeson and colleagues, Kraus has studied public misperceptions of racial economic inequality. In a 2017 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kraus et al. reported that Americans substantially overestimated Black–White economic equality across several domains. A 2019 article argued that Americans underestimate racial economic inequality, especially the Black–White wealth gap, in part because of racial progress narratives and meritocracy beliefs. Kraus has written about these themes in public commentary, including in the Los Angeles Times.

Recent work by Kraus has examined anti-Asian racism, Asian American solidarity, and misperceptions of Asian representation. In a recent paper, his lab studied perceptions of Asian subgroup representation in STEM, finding that participants misperceived representation among Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Filipino, and Vietnamese subgroups.

Awards and honors

Rising Star, Association for Psychological Science, 2013 Sage Young Scholars Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2018 Fellow, Association for Psychological Science, 2020 Graduate Mentor Award in the Social Sciences, Yale University, 2020 Diversity Science Award, Society of Experimental Social Psychology, 2025 Fellow, Midwestern Psychological Association, 2026

Selected publications